I still didn’t fix what’s plaguing our network at work, and my car was still not returned to me in working order. These two problems are really pissing me off, and I just want everything to work like they used to. Fortunately, things might change for the better tomorrow. I emailed the last tech guy today, and he replied with some great suggestions that I can’t wait to try out tomorrow. If he turns out to be right, then I was looking somewhere completely off than where I should’ve been looking. Two days down the drain, pretty much. But if I can fix it, then it was all worth it. As for my car, I’m going to have to replace the rack and pinion again because the mechanics don’t have a clue as to what else it could be. This sucks, but I may be able to cover the parts with the Autozone warranty from California. I’ll see about that when I get there.

I wish there was more to write about than that, but these last two days have been rough and have consisted nothing else but these issues. I wish I could say that I’ve tried to live my life more meaningfully, but I haven’t. That sense of quiet desperation? Yeah, that might’ve been be foreshadowing all the issues I’ve been having thus far this week. I did finish my first book of the year yesterday: Dennis Lehane’s the Drop. It was a fun read, and I’m kind of ashamed it took me two weeks to read it. I’m in the process of changing that today. I’m going to try to get more reading done this year, and that just means finding the time. I gotta cut something out and I think that’s going to be TV.

I had to send out an email to the entire staff this morning informing them that I was having issues trying to get the wireless working. It was a hard email to write but a necessary one because I was getting multiple emails in the first 15 minutes of my shift from teachers complaining about their wireless. If I wanted to figure this out, I needed to be free to do my job, not babysit everyone who needed help. It sucked, but I had to do it.

I feel bad that I wasn’t able to fix this issue on my own. I thought I had this job under control. I was thinking about the future, trying to plant some seeds now for bigger things down the line. Hell, I was even excited about it last week when I devoted an entire entry on one of those exciting projects. And then bam! Life threw me a curveball and I swung at it and missed. I can’t wait to go to work tomorrow and figuring this shit out with the new leads I have now. I want to put this behind me so I can get back with my life.

I guess I don’t want anyone to see me as the fraud I think I am. I’m not trained. I didn’t go to school. I’m self-taught. There’s things I just don’t know. I’m learning a helluva lot more now, but at what cost? I seriously thought of quitting, and if not that, I seriously feared that I was going to get fired. I’ve been feeling stressed today, but I’m happy with how I’m handling it. I’m not done yet. I still have some fight left.

I’m going to bitch about work this entry, and it might not make any sense or be that entertaining to read to anyone but myself. For that, all I have to say is fuck off. This is my space.

Today was supposed to be a good day. A normal day. A day to relax and get some projects off the ground. It was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which meant no students, which meant time to myself. That’s not what happened. The moment I stepped inside the high school building, I was told by a few teachers that the internet wasn’t working. I checked my phone to see if I was connected to the wireless, and I was, so I figured something happened to this teacher’s laptop. I go check it out and sure enough, I couldn’t connect to the internet. Little did I know that this was just the start of a whole day of pain.

My phone could connect to the internet. My laptop could connect to the internet. My iPad could connect to the internet. The teacher’s laptop could connect to the internet if it was hardwired to the network. But try to connect to one of the available wireless networks? Nope. All we got was an error message that said Windows could not connect to the network. It was so quick all the time that I thought maybe something was misconfigured on the laptop itself. I tried manually creating a connection to the network, and that didn’t work. I checked the logs, did the whole ipconfig gameplan, even restarted until my fingers bled, and nothing. So I went into my office and started checking my domain controllers.

My domain controllers were giving me errors concerning our DNS server. Error and error after error. Great, I thought. A start. But I didn’t know why they were giving me these errors. Nothing was changed — hell, nothing was touched since I left Friday that could’ve set off these errors. I went through each error and looked up solutions for them online. I fixed error after error after error until those errors didn’t come up anymore. Great, right? I fixed it. Nope. I tried my work laptop — which were giving me the same errors as the teacher laptop — and nothing. Same errors. I rebooted, flushed the DNS, tried making sure the changes I made to the server propagated across the network and into my laptop. Nothing. It didn’t work. I was stumped.

I tried checking the Group Policy, changing the DC’s NIC settings — which reminds me, out of our 2 DC’s, each with 8 virtual NIC’s that control our entire network, only one NIC was giving me issues. It was the switch controlling the IP address to my primary domain controller, or PDC for short, and it wasn’t connecting to the internet. It had no internet access. I checked and re-checked ad infinitum it’s DNS settings, its DHCP settings, everything I could, and nothing. It was giving me limited connectivity and I didn’t know why. I still don’t know why. I tried everything I knew to do, including exhausting my Google-fu, and nothing. I couldn’t figure it out. It pissed me off then and it pisses me off now as I write this.

Once my shift ended, I was pissed off. I wanted something good to happen. My car was supposed to be fixed today. On Friday, the mechanic told me they needed to order a new part that wouldn’t come until today, Monday. But once it came, he said, it’ll take 30 minutes to install. It was a sensor, he said. They’re easy to install. Great, I thought. Lets go get my car back. I get there, and I was told the mechanic couldn’t get to my car today. He’ll get to it first thing tomorrow morning. Great, I thought. Just great.

So I go home and kick ass during Insanity. I missed sweating. I missed pushing myself to my limits and feeling exhausted afterwards. Hell, exhausted during the workouts. I earned my sleep tonight. I earned my steak dinner. Except… I wanted to season my steak with pepper. The bottle I had was running empty, so I went to open a brand new one. It was wrapped in plastic, so I tried taking the plastic off. Somehow the lid was open, so when I pulled the plastic down below it, the lid popped off and I emptied the bottle of peppercorns all over my floor. Fucking great. Just… great.

What a fucking day. And my back hurts, and I’m still angry. Great.

Some people don’t like journalling because they don’t like trying to find a narrative to their lives. I never considered it that way until I read something yesterday from a guy who likes to keep a log of what he does throughout his days. He’d rather log that he had a taco at 12 PM on Friday than write an entry that may or may not include the fact that he had a taco. Journalling means different things to different people. I’ve tried keeping logs of what I do, but it bored me. The only log I really try to keep are the books I read, which includes the day I started them and the day I finished them. I’ve tried to keep logs on the television shows I watched, the food I ate, and the music I listened to. I like writing. I like thinking deeply about my day and trying to figure out that hook to start me off into some sort of narrative with no idea where it’ll take me.

Journalling is freeing. I learn more about myself during this act than at any other moment in my day. Because I know this, because I go through my day with the awareness that anything is fodder for the content of my journals, I can live my life freely. I don’t try to create a narrative because that just feels disingenuous. I live it as personally and as honestly as I could because then I can delve deeper into what I’m made of, and only by tearing myself apart and putting myself back together can I see what I’m made of. That’s why I really love journalling. The added audience aspect of it included in the openness of a blog makes me extra vigilant to be honest.

Today I ran some errands, cleaned up my house, and did my Weekly Review. I watched a lot of the Good Wife on Amazon Prime, and I took a few naps because my bed, pillows, and sheets are so comfy that it’s hard to stay awake while lying down on them. Pretty boring and standard day in the life of Mario. Going off of yesterday’s entry, I’m feeling desperate for something. It feels like I’m waiting for something. Someone to come into my life. Something to change it. Time to pass before my life actually starts. I don’t know.

I had a feeling earlier today. I’ve told some lies that I’m ashamed of telling. The lies themselves don’t matter. They’re small stuff, like telling someone I watched something — a TV show or something — when I haven’t. I used to tell lies all the time and didn’t care. Hell, I’m keeping some pretty big lies I told as a kid that I’m keeping from people even now, and I don’t feel that bad about them. It’s the lies from the past 5 years or so. One of the defining transformations I wanted to do was to stop lying, even small ones like those. And every time I fail, I feel it immediately, and I feel guilty. Sometimes I’m able to “save” it by backtracking or something and then telling the truth, but other times I don’t. I remember lying about watching a USC football game a few weeks ago at work, and that just ruined my whole day. I don’t know why I lied about except maybe just wanting to fit in. But all that came back today while watching highlights of the Seahawks/Packers game. I imagined talking to some co-workers about it tomorrow and talking to them like I watched the game when I just watched highlights. It’s stupid. I can just say I watched the highlights. But it’s bothering me for some reason. Worth writing about, at least.

I guess that’s what journalling is about, right?

I want to do things better. I want to do my blog better, I want to do my novel better, and I want to do every aspect of my life better. I don’t know how — I have some ideas for some things — but that’s how I feel after today. Sometimes I wish I didn’t feel this way. Life would be easier, I think, if I didn’t feel so dissatisfied with it so much. What’s the point?

I felt really good about myself today after I cleaned up around my house a bit. I cleaned up my desk, my bookshelf, and my books, and I like what I did with it. I stepped back and looked at my home, and I really loved it. I came up with more ideas as to how I can improve it, but I haven’t committed to anything yet. I don’t know why this stuff makes me happy, but it does.

I also, finally, scanned all the papers I’ve accumulated since before my vacation into my computer. Many of those were statements, and I felt bad again when I had to go into YNAB and reconcile my accounts. I spent so much money on car repairs, on gas, and at IKEA, that I hope it all becomes worth it. I think it does, but some old feelings are returning, and I don’t know what to do about them yet.

I became enamored with minimalism all those years ago because I had a lot of stuff, and I wondered what the point of it all was. Some of those feelings came back while organizing and cleaning my stuff. There were faint, but I recognized them from another life. I’ve caught up with my life from three years ago, and now I’m ready to get back into it. I have dozens and dozens of books stacked on my side table that I haven’t read yet. Books I bought years and years and years ago. It’s funny how different I am from the person who bought these books. Old ideas and old yearnings came back, and part of me has grown that I don’t feel those same old things anymore. I know I’m going to enjoy these books — hell, some of them are making me excited to start on them quickly — but it feels like I need to read them because I have them. Because I spent money on them, and they’re sort of a promise to my old self. A part of me thought I’d be a better person if I read this book or that one. Maybe I was right? Only one way to find out.

I like who I am, and I like who I’ve become, but I’m also dissatisfied with myself, and this inherent contradiction confuses me. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. Thoreau wrote that in Walden, one of my favorite books of all time. That quote just popped up in my head, and that’s exactly how I feel right now. Desperate for something, but I’m not sure what. I’m tapping my foot on the floor, always looking at the time, waiting for something, yearning for something soul-quenching, but it hasn’t arrived yet, if it ever will. Will I ever find fulfillment? I don’t know.

My life is dictated by choices, those I’ve made and those made by others. Because I believe in free will, I have the power to choose which choices I make, including those made by others. The way I react is, in a sense, a choice. I can react positively, negatively, or somewhere in between. The life I want to live is my choice, and who I choose to be right now is a choice. The fact that I’m writing this entry right now was a choice I made. Habits help make these choices easier, and if these habits are trained to be good and beneficial, then that was a choice. I wanted a certain outcome, so I decided to do what I needed to do to get that outcome. The more automatic I can make a lot of my choices, the better off I’ll be, especially if many of those choices are the best and most beneficial for me.

But sometimes I still make bad choices. Somewhere along the way, I made a choice that damaged my car. I’m not sure where — maybe it was the moment I decided to drive to California, or even to the moment I decided to buy the car in the first place — but I made it. I made the choice to have the dealer help me out, and today he finally did. We were supposed to meet in the morning, but he was running late, and I had to go to work, so I left without having the meeting. About 20 minutes into my shift, he dropped by my office with the loaner car I was to borrow while he worked on my car. That. Was. Incredible. When I saw him at my office, my jaw must’ve dropped all the way to the floor because he was someone I never expected to see in my office. After work, I drove back to the dealership and discovered the mechanic was stumped as to what could be the problem. They ordered a new part that won’t come until Monday, so I’m out of a car until then. I was questioning my choice of dealer before today, but after, I felt better about it. Who would drive to my job just to try to fix my car?

Another bad choice I’ve made concerns her. I fucked up, and I lost a friend. I made the choice of emailing her this week after four months of no contact, and she hasn’t replied. I then made the choice of texting one of her co-workers, and one of my friends, to tell her that I emailed her. I won’t hear back — if I even hear back — for another few days, so there’s another thing I’m waiting on. I also gave in and bought my comforter. I mostly bought it for aesthetic reasons, but I know it’s going to keep me super warm and super comfy. I was just tired of making my bed with three blankets that don’t amount to much individually. I also received my very nice and very beautiful cotton sheets this week, and they’re so soft and comfortable that they needed a nice comforter to go with it. I thought it was okay for me to buy it since my paycheck this week was much, much higher than I thought it was going to be because I had more paid vacation hours than I thought I had. I’m loving this job more and more.

I chose not to workout this week because of my health. I think that was a good idea, but I didn’t realize how much I’d miss working out. I enjoy the extra time not working out has given me, but I missed feeling good and tired and energized and everything else working out made me feel. I am feeling better health-wise, so I’m confident I’ll be back to my normal routine on Monday. I hope I choose to workout even harder than before and feel even better.

I’m in charge of my life. The choices I make defines who I am, and I’m the only one who can make those choices. I hope to learn more about myself to inform my decision-making abilities a lot more than ever before so I can have the best year I possibly can. That’s one goal I’m making toward building the house I want.

I’m a slave to my whims. When I feel like doing something, I’m going to do it. When I don’t feel like doing something even though it’s something I need to do, then I force myself to do it, regardless if I like it or not. I make myself like it. But I also procrastinate. I hold off from doing what I need to be doing for as long as possible. We all do this, right? I’m not the only one who does this. But when I get an idea, and it excites me, then I have to do it. I don’t think about it, and sometimes that comes back to hurt me. Like when I emailed her a few days ago. She hasn’t replied, and she might never reply, and that will either make me sad or make me not care anymore. But I didn’t even think about it when I emailed her. I just did it.

Remember those posts last month about dating? I’ve made zero progress since then, but a few days ago, I had the chance to talk to a girl, and I just let her walk by. I remember feeling so fucking bad afterwards. I recognized the opportunity, I knew I had to talk to her, but when that window opened up, I froze. I looked at her, and she looked back, and nothing. She walked by, and I walked the other way, and I wanted to jump off a cliff. I don’t know why I froze, but I did. C’est la fucking vie.

I’m also on day 130. 100 days ago I gave myself three goals to try and complete for the next 30 days. I didn’t complete them then, and I’m not really on track to complete them soon. I guess I’m reading still, but not as much as I wanted back then. The whole body fat issue turned out to be moot as I could tell I was losing fat by just looking at myself, and I stopped using whey protein powder. Instead, I’ve been using Primal Fuel for the past few months, and I think that’s helped me out a bunch. I’m not a big New Year’s resolution guy anymore, but I’ve definitely felt the lack of urgency I’ve felt for this year. Maybe some goals would help kickstart that drive. I don’t know.

Sure, I’ve come a long way, but a lot of it has felt easy. It was hard years ago when I spent so much time learning how to build and sustain habits, and even though I’ve fallen off the wagon many times since then, I knew how to get back on my feet and start over. I knew once I built up momentum, things will run more smoothly and I’d be happier. But it seems I haven’t taken that next step. What comes after you’ve built the foundation? The house. I haven’t built the house yet.

I’m not sure what type of house I want to build, but I know it’s time for me to start. I hope I don’t come back in 30 days and be like, remember when I was talking about building a house? Yeah, I’ve made no progress on that. Wish me luck.

You know what’s great? When you feel great. I feel great. Still not 100%, but better than even yesterday and especially better than a few days ago. I had so much energy at work today, and I didn’t know how much I missed feeling that way. That’s how I love to feel, and having that taken away from me for a few days was super unpleasant. I still have the occasional coughing and sneezing fits, but my headache, congestion, and runny nose are all gone, as well as any and all aches and feelings of fatigue. I miss working out, but I don’t want to ruin anything just yet, so I didn’t work out.

I remembered why I try to be hard on myself today. I felt a certain sense of relief on my drive home from work. I knew I didn’t have to work out, so I knew I could just pop open a playlist of TV shows to watch and simply lie in bed and watch them. I didn’t have to get ready for my pre- and post- workout routines, which meant my day was practically over. I used to do this all the time last year, and that just made me develop bad habits that I wanted to eradicate with the start of this blog. I know a week off isn’t going to damage my progress or anything, especially when I’ll be pushing myself even harder next week, but it was that feeling of relief that I didn’t like. It was like I was easing my foot off the pedal, and that entails death in my mind. I’m like Chev Chelios in Crank: I have to have that constant jolt of electricity in my system for me to live since anything less than that means death. Any downtime, to me, is bad. That’s why I have to keep forcing myself to move my feet.

On a side note: I like writing to an audience because I get to spend some time explaining through some things that seem common sense to me because they involve me, but with an audience, I get to somewhat explain my intimate thoughts, and through that process, I learn more about myself. I never experienced that in my journals, and that’s one big thing for why I love my blog. Anyways…

I emailed her yesterday. As all you guys know, this was somewhat coming for a while now, but the decision to do it yesterday came about kind of spontaneously. I just felt good, like I wrote about, and I decided to just do it. It was a short email where I asked a few questions and that was it. I don’t know if she still checks this email, and if she does, how often. Regardless, she hasn’t replied, and I’m inclined to assume she doesn’t check this email at all or that often. Of course, if she emails me back I’ll most definitely write about it here, so stay tuned. Ever since doing it yesterday, I’ve felt no regret when I thought I would. It didn’t seem like a momentous occasion, and I think that’s a good sign toward the state of my emotional health. I think I needed to ease up on being so hard on myself to simply do this and get it over with.

I guess I needed to get sick to reevaluate some of the priorities and mindsets in my life. Hmm…

I feel better today, which is awesome. I still woke up this morning super tired, super sick, and super irritated at the fact that my ceiling began leaking during the night, which cut my sleep short tremendously. I haven’t been able to catch up on sleep yet, but I will once I write this entry. I did some good work at my job today, I think, and I’m excited to continue this project I’m working on there tomorrow. To be technical, it involves creating group policies for folder redirection and roaming profiles that affects all the students. Since I’ve been at this job, I noticed a few “hacks” the previous tech guys set up, and for a while, they worked, but I was consistently running into their limited capabilities.

Folder redirection and roaming profiles helps me centralize everything on our one network attached storage drive. Whenever a user logs onto a computer, Windows creates all the necessary folders and registry settings in the C:\Users folder. This includes the Documents folder, the AppData folder, the Desktop, etc. The problem with this is that students don’t use the same computer all the time. Every time they grab a new netbook or laptop or when they logon onto a desktop, Windows creates all these folders and settings again, and nothing is synchronized between any of these computers. So if a student writes a paper or something on one computer, saves it onto the desktop, logs out and logs into some other computer, that document won’t be available. The “hack” the previous tech guy implemented was mapping a student folder to each individual student, and here the student’s documents followed them around everywhere.

The problem with this is that this only works for documents. Windows still has to create all those folders and settings for each computer the student logs onto. I’ve found folders from students from the last two graduating classes. That’s just wasted space being used for no purpose. So by redirecting all the folders to the NAS, everything is synced up — all the folders are synced, all their settings are synced, and Windows doesn’t create these folders on each individual computer because it accesses them all from the NAS. So a student can save a document on the desktop on one computer, log onto another computer, and that same document will be there on the desktop for them to continue editing. They can put music in the My Music folder on one computer and have that sync up across other computers. It’s really cool, really convenient, and really annoying to set up. I’ve been running into sharing permission issues that is boggling my mind right now. I blame my sickness.

I wrote so much about this because that was most of my day. I came home, popped some popcorn and ate it while watching some TV, made dinner and watched more TV, read a bit, wrote a bit more, and now I’m here, writing this. I felt like working out, but I didn’t want to risk anything, especially since today could just be a fluke, and I’ll be right back to feeling awful tomorrow. I was serious about taking the week off, even if I feel 100% tomorrow or the next day. By the time Monday comes around, I know I’ll push myself really hard to make up for this “lost” week.

Besides, tomorrow I have to drop off my car at the dealer to get it looked at, and they’re letting me borrow a van so I can take it to work. I’m going to need all the positive thoughts I can get to ensure my car isn’t in that bad of shape. God I hope so.

I decided to take the week off from working out to recoup and recover. I did not get any better today, and in fact, I think I got a little bit worse. I went to work and I had to move around a lot, which fatigued my body. Once I got home, things just got worse. Everything hurt. I was achy, tired, irritable, and a host of other negative emotions. I was minutes away from working out — I launched the videos on my computer and everything — but once I stood up from my bed, I fell back down and decided I should rest. It sucks because I just started this new Insanity workout last week, and now I have to postpone it for a bit. I’m thinking of starting over next week, so I know that I could the workout properly — the way it was designed. I’ldal think about that tomorrow, though.

It’s hard to write 500 words when I know I just want to go to sleep and rest. Does it even matter if I don’t reach my self-created word count? I think it does, if only for my own pride. I don’t like that I didn’t write 500 words consistently when I went to California. It’s like this thorn on my record, and it feels like I failed myself. I think that’s my sickness talking, but it’s what I’m feeling now. Co-workers at work told me that my body was just not used to all the germs at the school, and that it’ll take time for my immune system adapt. Others told me that my trip from California really screwed me up, and I’m just now paying the price. I don’t know about any of that. I think I got sick because I worked out all week with my shirt off when it was like 10 degrees inside my house. I woke up Saturday morning really cold, and I think that might have had something to do with it. I don’t know.

Needless to say, I didn’t do anything today that’s noteworthy, except, I guess, for the usual suspects. I wrote my words for my novel and the rest of my morning routine, I read a bit from my book and accomplished the rest of my nightly routine. Now I just want to sleep. I haven’t been going back and re-reading and revising my entries for what seems like a few weeks, which tells me I’m just regurgitating these entries out and not spending my time with them like I used to. These entries used to take me a good hour to write and complete. Now it’s taking me like 15-20 minutes, if that. I’m cheating myself from improving all because I want to sleep or I want to watch some TV or some other mindless task. That needs to change. I don’t like that I’m doing that.

God, it seems like I’m more hard on myself when I’m sick than when I’m not. Relax, dude!

I woke up this morning with a blistering headache. Actually, scratch that. I woke up multiple times this morning with a blistering headache. I went to bed around 10 PM last night, and I woke up about 90 minutes later. My nose was running, my face felt congested, and I just wanted to stop feeling anything. I next woke up at around 3 AM, and I couldn’t go to sleep, so I watched an episode of the Good Wife. It helped. I went to bed and woke up again a bit after 8 AM. I then got up and did my morning routine. After breakfast, I went back to bed and tried to watch some TV to distract me from my headache. It was until 6 PM when I decided I couldn’t handle the pain anymore, and I went to the grocery store and bought some aspirin. This was the first time I’ve taken aspirin in years, so when I realized my headache went away and I just felt better, I blamed my years-long abstinence.

Now that I knew I really did catch a cold today, I had to make peace with the fact that my 47 month long streak of not getting sick had ended. I almost made it to a full four years, but that’s okay. I had to get sick sometime. This is not unbreakable. But now that that streak has been broken, I began to think about breaking other streaks. I thought about breaking my daily blog writing streak, and my reading voraciously streak, and my days spent without talking to her, and many other ones, but I decided to keep them going. The world doesn’t end when I get sick. It’s kind of sad that I have to write that because I’m only sick. I’m not dying. Yes, it’s been a while since I’ve been sick, and I forgot how horrible it feels, but it’s just a part of life. It shouldn’t destroy anyone’s days. Just take it slow, rest, and keep doing what you gotta keep doing. So I spent all day in bed today, taking naps, watching TV, and feeling sorry for myself until I bought some aspirin.

My cousin gave birth to a beautiful baby girl today after over 40 hours. She’s beautiful, and I can’t wait to meet her. I wish she decided to come when I was down there in California, but she didn’t, and that’s okay. I’ll be down there again before I know it, and I’ll meet my first cousin, once removed. Yeah, I got sick this weekend, but my cousin gave fucking birth. I really have no right to bitch about feeling disgusting when there’s someone out there bringing life into this world. All I gotta do is suck it up and keep things in perspective.

I have to go to work tomorrow, and I don’t want to feel this way, especially when my car’s still screwed up and there’s this cold ass winter still hitting us and I have to wake up early to get my morning routine done on time. I live alone; I have a right to bitch on my blog. Wah wah wah.